Antoni Muntadas

Barcelona, 1942

Lives and works between Barcelona, New York and Venice.

 

 

Antoni Muntadas’s work has developed from its beginning –early seventies– a constant criticism towards the languages and messages of the media as clear instruments of power.

 

Since the first moment he used the video as useful tool to dissect and make the mechanisms of communications visible, referring to television and the designated `media landscape´. This genuine study and treatment turned him into an early pioneer in the audiovisual artistic field.

 

Likewise, Muntadas has analyzed and questioned the relationships that are established between the public and the private through his video works, photographs and multimedia installations; it’s from the early nineties that he incorporates internet to this list.

 

Also, since the 90s, he initiates new kinds of long-term. In each of these projects a principal concept is developed, which extends through different stages and contexts.

Perejaume

Sant Pol de Mar, 1957

Lives and works in Sant Pol de Mar

 

 

Perejaume started to exhibit his work during the late seventies and since then he has been developing it in parallel, either in visual disciplines or in literary extension.

 

The landscape is a recurring subject analyzed and explored in his work, retaking and reevaluating the presence it has had most of all, in its literary and visual production. Through this approach, his relationship with the landscape is examined from diverse points of view none of which are exempt of irony. Points of view that are shaped through painting, sculpture, photography, installations, video or the intervention on the natural environment itself.

 

For Perejaume, man is part of the landscape, he isn’t an outsider to it and he is yet another agent in its conformation and evolution, as if the geologic time would have been accelerated.

Javier Peñafiel

Zaragoza, 1964

Lives and works in Mallorca

 

 

Javier Peñafiel’s work, drawings, videos, texts and sculptures make up a linguistic system parallel to a reality to which he is unconnected.

 

All through his career, Javier Peñafiel has built up a universe inhabited by characters; by sentences that work autonomously, such as phrases that have the duty to bother the quiet and routine based use of the language by the spectator; or videos where diverse elements are combined in the shape of tableaux, sharing a space but keeping at the same time their identity separate.

 

The works of Javier Peñafiel show the necessity and the difficulty in direct communication. His works investigate the double identity – as obstacle and as a bridge- that the language represents in such communication.

Fernando Prats

Santiago de Chile, 1967

Lives and works in Barcelona

 

 

In his work Fernando Prats “paints” or, we’d rather say, recreates nature; he deals with registering tracks, making the invisible visible, giving voice and image to what was present but kept unnoticed.

 

Using seismographs, traces, photographs, videos… he registers the beat of different realities on smoked supports, from the flight of birds to the wild jet of a geyser, the deep coal of mines or the powerful waves that break against the cliff. Thus, Fernando Prats holds an unorthodox relationship with painting, both for the choice of his instruments and for the intervention of chance.

 

His work is formalized in actions which himself registers, that show the creative processes intrinsic to his work. Fernando Prats paintings are time-objects, as they condense in their finished form a story, the one of its creation, whose times often have nothing to do with the ones of the artist, but with the natural rhythms.

Caio Reisewitz

São Paulo, 1967

Lives and works in São Paulo

 

 

The register of a high-speed changing nature is one of the subjects that articulates Caio Reisewitz’s photographic work and, in this sense, his images are placed in a tradition in which photographic means are witnesses and capture ephemeral realities. The activity of man on the planet, and in certain areas in particular, radically modifies the appearance of the landscape.

 

His photographs, which are mostly large format, are characterized by their frontality and by a spectacular clarity that shows an exuberant nature and an unreal utopian beauty. On one occasion he himself commented: ‘sometimes these images don’t seem real, utopian they are, but they are true, it is the pure reality’.

Ràfols Casamada

Barcelona, 1923-2009

 

 

Besides his long pictorial career which has boosted him internationally, Albert Ràfols Casamada has another creative side as a literary poet. It is of no surprise that his multidisciplinary character attracts him to teaching and pedagogy in the world of fine Art.

 

In his painting, modernity’s fragile equilibrium has been developed and maintained: his work, of classical origin, incorporates at the same time the legacy of the avant-gardes.

 

During the early seventies he abandoned figuration to work in the field of abstract painting that would take him, during the eighties and nineties, to develop a more lyrical abstraction. This process would lead to what is his most recognized stage in his artistic career.

 

On the other hand, Ràfols Casamada has had a fundamental role in the renewal of the arts teaching in Spain being the founding member of the Eina School in Barcelona in 1967.

Julião Sarmento

Lisbon, 1948- Estoril, 2021

 

 

From the early seventies, Julião Sarmento has explored the possibilities of painting, photography, sculpture, installation and video. There is a process of suggestive hiding in his works that situates the spectator not only as an observer but also as a participant of his narrative.

 

The woman is a recurring motive in his works and from it he elaborates concepts linked to sexuality, desire or seduction. The relationships he evokes, on latent tension, violence, obsession or mystery, are obtained from a meticulous dynamic between the participating agents in the physical space, in the case of installations, or in the edition, in case of films and videos. The resulting works unleash all the detached intrigue of the images in constant suspense and tension.

José María Sicilia

Madrid, 1954

 

 

José María Sicilia was one of the most significant representatives of Spanish painting in the eighties who identified himself with the young generation of artists that at the beginning of that decade, took up the practice of a `material´ perspective in painting

 

From 1985, Sicilia initiates a new series of works on the subject of flowers, by which he is specially recognized in Spain. This new thematic development would take him deeper in an investigation focused in the analysis of the shape, the construction of space and the structure of light.

 

In the abstract painting that this artist has developed lately, the use of wax acquires a main role for its possibilities of dialogue with light and the creation of spaces in the pictorial surface.

Soñé que revelabas (Madeira), 2019

Santander, 1954

Lives and works in New York and Saro (Cantabria)

 

 

Juan Uslé´s painting is based on his urban experience, particularly New York, where he moved in the late eighties. Visual perception, liquid – so mobile and fluid – and light structures and spaces, greatly influenced him, bringing forth a combination of geometric elements and organic elements in his compositions.

 

Juan Uslé works mixing his own colors and applying them by dispersion on canvas, building abstract images from geometric patterns, light and color. In each of his compositions he combines the search of an organization and structure, along with the appearance of the unexpected.

 

The painting of Juan Uslé analyzes, rather than expresses, the origin of his own images based on the urban experience. His practice is based on the interplay between formal antitheses, and so his work is defined as opposing dynamics.

Vidal

Palma de Mallorca, 1972

Lives and Works in Berlin

 

 

Alejandro Vidal´s photographs and videos stage, dramatize, dramatize and make contemporary societies´ common gestures and acts visible; the codes used in the rituals of the collective leisure or the work relationships are object of a detailed analysis.

 

An analysis that isn´t exent of a certain pathos. The spectator who stands in front of his works can recognize iconographies that are linked to certain urban tribes or that can either refer to punk music club culture, among others.

 

Vidal deconstructs in those images the patterns that shape an omnipresent language in the communication media to distill the signs of implicit violence.

LUIS GORDILLO

Confesión general

CAAC Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla

07.10 – 28.02.2017

This exhibition is a classical retrospective in the sense that it focuses on the key moments and milestones in the prolific career of Luis Gordillo (b. Seville, 1934), establishing an itinerary that covers the majority of his creative stages and the different media he has used over the years. In its inaugural presentation in Seville, the show follows a chronological route through period-specific rooms with multiple stops along the way: the automatic drawings of his Art Informel stage; the heads related to British Pop Art, along with his three-four-legged creatures, pedestrians and motorists; drawing as the backbone of his 1970s output, together with his experiments in photography and seriality which lasted most of that decade; the 1980s, primarily represented by his “meandering” series; the 1990s, centred on one of his most important paintings, Blancanieves y el Pollock feroz [Snow White and the Big, Bad Pollock]; experiments with new formats and media that accompanied the advent of the digital era in the 2000s; and, finally, a new series of heads created in 2015. Additionally, a separate space attempts to show how his works are constructed by means of a replica or reproduction of his studio.

http://www.caac.es/english/exh/projects/frame_gor16.htm